Barry Hannah - High Lonesome

This statement went out over the national wire along with the other ghastly events of that afternoon in Carriba. The big slick men’s magazine in New York called me. By the time I arrived the bodies were five months old.

Around the room sat Ebbnut, Blackie, Modock and python and high school sweetie, and one of Blackie’s sister alcoholics, Pearl from down the road. The women were well into the beer. On the counter of the sink was four pounds of bleeding hamburger defrosting in pink webs over the brown-veined porcelain. Blackie thought I looked Filipino and this idea was hilarious to her and her mate, shrieking away. But the boys moved me. Ebbnut reminded me exactly of an old high school chum who had gone far on the trombone with merry diligence and very small talent. Modock, lean and hungry, startled and sad at the same time if you could tell by his green eyes, was flat-out pretty. He seemed not made for this earth either. He hardly spoke. I withered, already impertinent, an obscenity.

My whole professional life reared up in my mind. I was a hag and a parasite. I was to be grave and eloquent over their story, these people I would not have spat at unless three people had been murdered. They were to get nothing. I was to get fame and good bucks, provided I was interesting. A great sick came on me. Already I was looking at leaner but better years.

Minkle was not in the house. I believe she was currently over in Hattiesburg failing at something menial. Her ex-husband was in prison. Her grandfather, Blackie’s Pa, had been in prison. I had already seen him while tracing the new whereabouts of the Modocks. He was a little man out cutting a huge lawn around a tiny box of a house. You know: we’ve had our troubles, he said. He was worried about Blackie’s drinking problem. Blackie was currently worried about the $15,000 insurance on “my husband’s” life. She was also screaming at the police, who would not return the clothes of “my husband.” For some reason she wanted back the clothes he had on when he was shot. When something was owed Blackie, I noted she struck the formal tone “my husband.”

I saw them five times and at no time did anybody commiserate with the families of the dead policemen. They listened to a police-band radio for home entertainment, even still. I noticed police-band radios were the hottest item at every pawnshop in town. A running battle with the police was a fact as manifest as wallpaper. I’d noticed the same about some bikers in Pensacola I wrote about. Take away the harassment and dogged persecution of the police and the folks had little cause to exist. I suspected Blackie was a looker at one time but she was fast turning dry, blotched, and yellow, with dark teeth through which she issued this astounding promise: When I get my husband’s insurance money I’m gettin’ me a good gun. We need us a good gun .

I nearly dropped my pencil. Modock was silent, as usual, with his sweetie pressing up to him, whispering about money, job, and car. Modock had a deep curious thing going with his ma, as most of us do, but these were Mississippi criminal Irish and among them Mama Love often kills, one way or the other. I began glaring at Blackie as the likely source of it all, or much of it. She caught on to this, got drunker, and I left with her spitting a much meaner and more poisonous laughter, as if I’d just kicked over her rock and she was lying all twisted and naked beyond my heels. Among the dispossessed you find an insane loyalty in family members that does not exclude murder of their own. Go ahead, Henry, and do what you have to do .

I told Modock if he stayed here he would die. He should live in my town and give the line beginning with him another whole chance.

Blackie, way in the background, had somehow heard me. I heard the shriek.

Nevertheless, in two weeks, he was at my door, behind him Blackie in a smoking Pontiac belonging to her mate up front who was too drunk to drive. Little Ebbnut was in the backseat with his kind smile. The car filthy with oil and dust over mud. You could barely read the tag when they turned and left. Pearl River County. Modock had said only, I’m here . Blackie called out the words that still rang, in her hag’s shriek, I see where you live! See where you live, Filipino!

I asked Modock, there with his bag and hound Beaumont on my front porch, where his sweetheart was. She’d barely left his hip when I was in Carriba.

Put her away from me .

And came right here.

Like you said. Get a new life .

It was June and I rented the house next door, a lesser brown box in this old exurb, not ranchy at all. More chicken-houselike but squared into four rooms inside as if by a child with a ruler. My wife was soon muttering, no surpise, since she’s from mother stock who’s narrowed the world down to one gallstone. But neveryoumind, I took her off to Paris, gave her a Gold card, put us up in a fancy hotel that was Gestapo headquarters during the Occupation, and climbed her like an alp while she grabbed the curtains. She came back dripping with history and stayed actually mute and tender toward the world for a couple weeks. Thing that saves us is that the house is enormous and I don’t see her for days. She deeply resented having to cook the one night for Modock, and I would pay for it, I knew. Please, please, punish me with silence, I begged her with my eyes. She panted back to her great leisure room where she has three-hour phone conversations with her kin about how many people they have told off today, barks of victory spilling out now and then like canned soundtrack. Great God, and here I was already going from upper to flat middle class, in some fear. They gave me a class in journalism at the university. It was hard being smooth and unneedy when I applied, but I had a name and I’d once witnessed for a prof there who stayed out of jail.

I was eating with my cronies at a downtown pizza and pasta bar when something hit me hard in the back of the head. Then I heard the pop of a shoe, a sneaker on the plank floor, and saw a body in a jumpsuit hastening away, with girl hair on top of it. This was Minkle. I’d never seen her before and here she’s popped me among friends in a town absolutely strange to her. She turned, about twenty feet away, not looking even faintly like Blackie or the rest of them, and waved as if we’d been bosom chums since rocks and water. I had no idea who she was, but she hollered over.

I’m here now. Come on in the house. Don’t be a stranger .

As if I could sense who she was and she knew I could. And she was right. I was baffled a little by the blow to the head, but she couldn’t be anybody else.

Soon afterward, it was at Kroger’s, where I enjoy watching others’ wives, a hard rod came in my ribs at an aisleturn. This hurt. It was Minkle at the end of a mop who’d rammed me. She had a broad smile on.

Uh-oh! Watch out now!

I was in misery and didn’t smile at all. I don’t think I said anything, just covered my ribs with my hands where it hurt, seriously hurt. Then she was gone, with a giggle.

There was a vast chemical spill in Carriba years ago, from a plant that packed up and left. Downtown, a man walked the streets wearing bright universal orange tape around his knees. He said it was to keep alligators away. A policeman I spoke to over the phone told me that the town was run top to bottom by a conspiracy of homosexuals. Henry Modock had wandered freely here. Several claimed he was the nicest man they’d ever met, almost. The town drug dealer worked from a roadhouse and was straight out the worst man I’d ever looked at, a grim, giant-stomached muskrat with no shirt and enormous fat red feet in sandals. He was holding the youngest of his infants while his wife raised an ungodly din back in the living quarters. The man may have been furtive but it could have done him no good. He wasn’t even a modern criminal. He belonged in the line of psychotic white trash straight from the days of Mike Fink. Feet dyed by the pirate river. I heard he was sly and stayed out of prison because “he done good turns now and then for the police.” Yet he was arrested within the week on big drug charges. Everybody knew what he did and where he was. You’d get directions to Benny Harp, the drug dealer. Sure, the town had its mansions and fine people. A former governor had built a Spanish mansion here. I spoke to two of these prosperous good boys. Both of their wives had gone mad within a week of each other. Another told me he deeply feared the ocean. It was an hour and a half away. Yet another shot his father-in-law out of a tree stand, thinking he was a “wolfbear.” Straight across the Mississippi River in Louisiana was a north-south rough rectangle seventy miles long besotted by petrochemicals for generations. It had the highest incidence of cancer in the nation.